Lunch was sandwiches, pasta salads, chicken soup and apple turnovers (for me at least, they always have a great selection of food…), the next session after lunch was:
Adobe Photoshop for the Web
Jim Maivald from Adobe
Started with discussion of the upcoming CS4 suite – just that it’s coming out and will be a “free” upgrade if you buy CS3 within 60 days of purchasing it. Also offered free day of training if your order is 50K or more. Not really in my league…
Next he opened up Photoshop CS3 – immediately opened a photo and started showing how to use the levels palette to adjust colors, both simply by adjusting black and white and by using the 3 eye droppers (white and black) to tell PS how to identify those colors.
He opened the curves palette next. He showed us how to preserve the rest of the image by putting anchors on the curve line while messing with pixels in other parts of the images.
Shadows/Highlights pallette followed. He demonstrated using this palette to do some sharpening of the picture without *actual* sharpening.
New selection tool – magic selection has become even more magical! Click & drag to select – make sure the “target” icon is in the area you want to keep. He then showed how to change pixels after you’ve selected them without being destructive using the adjustment layers (allows you to add make limited changes that are applied in a layer without changing/destroying the original pixels).
Smart Objects – a photo that is captured and stored somewhere secret that will allow you to make changes in any way, but will keep all the pixel info of the original in the smart object – (right click on layer and convert image to smart object) – do your work, any filters used will be smart filters – double-click on the filter in the layers palette and make changes to the filter properties, add filters to the smart object, make all kinds of changes without it being permanent!
Showed photo merge with new layer automerge capability – each image becomes a layer that can be merged several different ways. Showed really cool technique where several pictures with different people looking off to the distance were taken and merged them, then masked the top layer over the faces that were facing off camera and bring up the face where they “were” looking at the camera.
Rubber stamp tool – I’ve played with it before. He discussed cloning with perspective, which is somewhat difficult. He showed us vanishing point, a tool that lets you define an area with perspective taken into account.
Black & white conversion was next – lots of ways to see what your photo will look like in B&W.
At this point, he’s talking so fast that I can’t keep up… I’m doing a terrible job with the note-taking, but I’ll keep trying!!
Umm, I lied – check out the Zoomify stuff in CS3 – that is cool, lets you put a zoomable pic on your site with code that is created start to finish in Photoshop. Nifty!
Mentioned Device Central (lets you see your images as a cell phone screen would show it) and went into a bit of a disscussion on how people in a few years *won’t* be accessing your sites via the web on a computer, they will be accessing it via their phone, tv, refrigerator… and that’s why XML (which is the “big daddy” of RDF, XHTML, RSS, etc.) is so important. A direct corrollation to my previous session!!
Finished with a discussion of animation in Photoshop (while talking to his computer – which cracked me up, since I do that *all* the time!)
Next is vendor time and possibly nap time, then the Pinnacle awards banquet time!
